On Saturday, 25 January 2025, the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the Institute for Palestine Studies launched the Third Annual Palestine Forum in Doha. The Forum continues its tradition as one of the foremost academic gatherings for Palestine Studies, with state-of-the-art research on issues ranging from international law to cultural heritage, political movements, history, and global solidarity. Azmi Bishara, the General Director of the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies (ACRPS), delivered the keynote lecture of the third Annual Palestine Forum, discussing the recent developments in the Palestinian cause and the dimensions of Palestinian steadfastness in the face of the ongoing Israeli genocide.

The full text:

Distinguished Guests,

Gaza, and those who supported and sympathized its people, rejoiced in the ceasefire. The truce came after negotiations that required steadfastness of epic proportions given that Israel’s chief bargaining tool was its arsenal of lethal weapons. The relief felt is perhaps as great as the magnitude of crimes committed over the course of the last fifteen months.

The Israeli government fought tooth and nail to prolong the war. After exhausting every trick to wriggle out of the ceasefire, it took advantage of each moment between the agreement being reached and the scheduled cessation of hostilities to wreak yet more senseless killing and destruction. From the announcement of the agreement in Doha, on the evening of Wednesday, 15 January 2025, until the ceasefire came into effect on Sunday, 19 January 2025, Israeli strikes on the Gaza Strip accelerated, resulting in another 247 dead and 638 wounded. There is no rational explanation for this opportunistic killing spree. And now the West Bank is paying the price for the Israeli far right being forced to accept the deal.

On social media after the truce, activists continued to argue about who won and who lost the war. It is a debate that can only be had if everyone redefines victory and defeat as they please, which means it is little more than a dialogue of the deaf in a virtual space.

Israel failed to free the hostages by force and to eliminate Hamas, to say nothing of the broader resistance. This is a fact. Seeing resistance fighters emerge out of the rubble on the day of the handover of the first batch of hostages was no less amazing than their resilience during Israel’s longest assault. The resistance remains the most organized force in the Gaza Strip, and Israel so far has been unsuccessful in finding an organization loyal to it, save for the criminal gangs that raid relief trucks.

The occupation was compelled to accept what had been on the table not only since May 2024, but since the beginning of 2024: an end to the war, a prisoner exchange, and a gradual withdrawal. Israel had chosen to continue the war, driven by domestic politics and an unbridled lust for revenge and retaliation against the Palestinians. There was also a consensus in Israel that the situation in Gaza could not be allowed to revert to what it was before 7 October. This goal it achieved, and it could not have done so without an all-out war of annihilation, a genocide. But even after achieving this goal, it did not cease its aggression due to Israel party politics and because it did not have a feasible vision for administering Gaza after the genocide. That it was forced to stop short of this does not mean that it has abandoned its objective of forming a local administration with Arab participation and under Israeli supervision.

It goes without saying that the situation in Gaza is no longer what it was before 7 October. Equally obvious is the difference between survival and victory. This requires no further commentary.

Although Israel achieved its goal of reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble, it continued to rain down hellfire and brimstone because decision-makers in the occupying power were emboldened by the iron-clad US commitment to support Israel and Arab verbal condemnations coupled with an official show of helplessness. Israeli leaders became adept at testing the impact and potential blowback of the unchecked use of the machinery of destruction on Palestine and the region. They chose to starve Gaza, pursue a scorched-earth policy, intensify settlement building, and repress and terrorize the population in the West Bank.

The United States and Israel had tried to forge an expansive strategic regional arrangement involving multiple Arab countries, and the resistance thwarted it. Hence the size of the coalition that supported the eradication of the resistance in Gaza.

Two assertions I made at the beginning of this war have proven correct: expect the worst after 7 October and what comes after will not be the same as what came before, not only for the Palestinians, but for the entire region. It came as no surprise, that the Israeli response was all-out war; US support was absolute; and some actors in the Arab order sat by waiting for the Israeli response to do away with the Islamic resistance. The fracture between Palestinian factions persisted without qualm or scruple even in the shadow of a genocidal war against the Palestinian people.

The worst-case scenario was Israel’s decision to turn a retaliatory war of vengeance – a war of so-called self-defence – into a genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. The war sunk to ever lower depths, gauging international and Arab reactions after each round, until Israel felt reassured it could kill and destroy with absolute impunity. Its tenacity in this respect accustomed the “world” to its frenzied bombing of schools and hospitals, its manifestations of sadism, and its deliberate overstepping of all red lines.

On the subject of self-defence, allow me to quote from an introduction I wrote to a book that will be published soon, which includes a full translation into Arabic of the proceedings of Israel’s trial for genocide. In this passage, I address the problem of the need to prove intent in order to prove the commission of genocide:

Any determination of intent in the genocide waged by the occupation against the indigenous population cannot remain trapped in jurisprudence while ignoring history and culture. There are three main elements whose impact on the formation of genocidal intent in the Israeli case should not be ignored. The relationship between these elements, the direct statements of Israeli officials, and the large-scale actions and crimes committed during the war can easily be examined: 1) racism and the sense of superiority over the indigenous people as a group (contempt for them and their culture, the denial of their existence as a people and as individuals), which fosters acquiescence to their expulsion and replacement and the acceptance of a reality in which they are collected into ghettos like Gaza; 2) the justification of collective reprisals against them because they are not individuals, organizations, or a people, but rather backwards groups that must be punished collectively; and 3) the omnipresent sense of Israeli insecurity, both conscious and unconscious, arising from the deep-seated conviction that the indigenous population cannot accept the settlers and their polity coupled with prejudices about the brutality and primitiveness of the indigenous people.

When the war drums begin to beat and the government encourages its soldiers to respond to an operation like 7 October against a small, besieged, and densely populated strip of land, and when the authorities express in more than one way that the war will not distinguish between combatants and civilians, these three elements in the prevailing culture are adequate evidence that the statements of Israeli leaders are not merely intemperate bursts of anger, but are popularly understood as genocidal intent.

Genocides may be motivated by pathological justifications of self-defence. The motive in such cases is a twisted notion of self-defence against a perceived peril, imagined or real. This perspective can help to illuminate certain obscure aspects of the motives of perpetrators of atrocities. It is difficult to lead people to carry out or be complicit in large-scale crimes without demonizing and/or dehumanizing the other as a group. On the other hand, the perpetrators might act based on cold calculation, a lack of human empathy, and bloodlust, swept into an orgy of mass murder, divorced from the self, human conscience, and all moral constraints.

Mainstream political culture in Israel is dominated by a neurotic obsession with security, which makes it easier to accept the notion of an existential threat propagated by the ruling authorities. For various reasons, the source of this fixation is found in the history of settler colonialism, the denial of the crime and the criminalization of the victim, and the way this fear is fed by racist stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims even to the point of physical revulsion, which in turn facilitates the acceptance of and participation in the killing of Arabs.

One cannot always perceive the moment at which fear and vengefulness shift into arrogance, revelling in destruction to dispel the fear of wreaking it, and exulting in might and the reclamation of masculine virility – which, in line with the Zionist ethos, the diaspora Jews who were led to the crematoriums did not possess. Hence Israel’s need to focus on the Holocaust, not only to elicit global sympathy and turn the perpetrator into a victim, but also to generate the fear and the need to overcome it by crushing the other. Yet, some Western researchers have concluded that the term genocide does not apply to phenomena such as Israeli soldiers boasting in front of their own cameras and their perverse thrill in killing and destruction.

Despite the moral and political significance of South Africa’s case against Israel under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, jurists and lawyers are necessarily preoccupied with defining crimes rather than combating them. Legal briefs revolve around identifying exactly which crimes Israel has committed. Are they crimes of genocide, or “mere” war crimes and crimes against humanity? The responsibility to protect (R2P), endorsed by UN member states at the 2005 World Summit, is binding on all heads of state and government, and this responsibility includes protection not only from genocide, but also from war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity.

In fact, however, it is not binding, nor are the decisions of the International Court of Justice. The distinction between advisory and binding in international law is purely moral when the law is not sovereign and no state is capable of and willing to enforce it, as evidenced by the fact that Israel did not implement the provisional measures ordered by the ICJ on 26 January 2024, forcing the South African government to return to the court several times (16 February, 6 March, 10 May) to seek an order for implementation. On 29 May 2024, South Africa turned to the UN Security Council as well – precisely because the court does not possess enforcement mechanisms. Although the Palestinians and the solidarity movement welcome the ICJ’s recognition that there is a reasonable basis to consider the charge of genocide and to place Israel in the dock for the crime of genocide in particular, the provisional measures put in place pending the court’s ruling on the question were not applied, and Israel continued to commit its crimes in the Gaza Strip until the day of the ceasefire.

Turning to the Palestinian level: if not even Palestinian suffering during this war could make the case for unity, then there is no hope. The current Palestinian leadership cannot achieve Palestinian unity because of its conflict of interests, which are entirely divorced from the national interest. There is no roof under which Palestinian political pluralism can thrive, nor a common base on which to stand. The PLO has been systematically liquidated over the past two decades, and there is fierce official opposition to its revival.

With all the chaos in standards and concepts, the way is clear for those bent on marginalizing and dismantling the PLO, and turning it into a name with no substance, so they can then accuse anyone who calls for reviving the PLO of trying to create an alternative. Absent an inclusive national entity, whether a state or an organization, there is no pluralism that can be united under a framework or preserved by a common cause. There is only fragmentation, conflicts of interest, and a chronic rift that cannot be mended by the exchange of kisses and honeyed words, nor deepened by reciprocal invective. We have reached a point where one party is waiting for the occupation to eliminate the other, heedless of the bonds of national belonging.

It is impossible to adequately narrate the particulars of the catastrophe in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Attempts at thoughtful, sophisticated descriptions come off as hackneyed and trite, fit only for seeking likes on social media. The task now is to work for a sustained ceasefire – this is the will of the entire Palestinian people – and move towards reconstruction. This is the only way to shore up steadfastness and prevent mass displacement from Gaza if that becomes feasible, which is what the new US administration wants. The second task is to prevent Israel from washing off the stain of genocide and from being accepted regionally as a regional player.

I will not tire of recalling the consequences of the act of Palestinian resistance and the Israeli genocide. After a long period of marginalization, the Palestinian cause is once more on the international and regional agenda. We must take advantage of this change. War is futile in the case of Palestine, for the conflict will end only with the total annihilation of the Palestinian people or with a just resolution. Israel cannot wage a war more savage than the last, which also showed its limits. Palestine’s cause must therefore be raised again.

Throughout modern history, colonizers have repeatedly faced an either/or dilemma at a moment of demonstrable military superiority and, simultaneously, demonstratable limitations.

That Israel has come face to face with this dilemma is a logical conclusion of historical experience, not a historical inevitability, but as we know from experience, the official Arab order defies all logic. Hence, Israel and the United States may find Arab regimes and even Palestinians that offer Israel a way out of its impasse without resolving the question of Palestine.

I cannot describe Israel's dilemma as an achievement, since it is a product of the dialectic between the right of might and the might of right. This dialectic cannot resolve itself on the ground without conscious political wills set on restoring the Palestinian cause to the international agenda and are resolved not to offer Israel and its US backer a way out from having to face the historical predicament of colonialism.

A unified Palestinian stance is of the utmost urgency. The absence of such a unified stance is precisely why Israel can manoeuvre so freely internationally, regionally, and within Palestine to focus attention on its own dilemma instead of the Palestinian plight. It seems as though Palestinians are fated to have to choose between bad and worse: either a local administration in participation with an Israeli-approved Arab party under Israel’s supervision or ongoing decimation coupled with the prevention of reconstruction to encourage migration. Those who issued hasty statements rejecting the joint Palestinian “Community Support Committee” overseeing the administration of Gaza and expressing are helping to foist the Israeli dilemma onto the Palestinians.

The Palestinian Authority can resume the administration of Gaza despite Israel and with the consent of the resistance, which has already stated that it would agree to a PA-led government and that it has no desire to join the cabinet. This is sufficient to achieve a form of consensus. This is preferable to a return of the PA despite the resistance, as if it were cashing in on an investment in the Israeli war.

The International Dimension

At the international level, the US position was especially striking for its ideological features, which were far beyond a reflection of Washington’s economic and geostrategic interests. Officials and politicians in Washington leaped to embrace Israel’s narrative of the events of 7 October, its instrumentalization of the Nazi Holocaust, and its fallacious definitions of anti-Semitism. They incorporated these elements into campaigns vilifying anyone who protested the Israeli war of aggression and the unqualified support Israel received from Washington. The image of the US administration suffered due to its perpetual readiness to parrot Israel’s lies, justify its crimes, dismiss human rights discourse when it came to Palestinians, and amplify Israel’s so-called right to self-defence. Consistent with the Israeli narrative, the conflict began on 7 October and “self-defence” justified trampling all humanitarian values underfoot (even though wars by occupying powers against occupied peoples are not considered self-defence under international law) and perpetrating genocide.

The image of the US Congress fared no better following the scenes of Congresspeople leaping to their feet to applaud every Netanyahu lie and cheer his claim to represent the children of light against the children of darkness. Politics was stripped of all moral substance, and no official or spokesperson batted an eye. The same applied to varying degrees to other Western countries, which proved ready to suppress the freedom of expression in their democracies to please a state bent on genocide and entrenching an apartheid system in the twenty-first century.

Has the occupying power exhausted Western powers’ reserves of hypocrisy and willingness to forego their self-defining principles when it comes to the Palestinian people? Has Israel so sapped the terms "Holocaust" and "anti-Semitism" of substance to the point of trivializing them as it ventured to exploit one genocide to justify another? At least, henceforward, when Israeli official policy attempts to capitalize on the Nazi Holocaust, everyone will remember the genocide in Gaza. Such effects are inevitable. However, the US and other Western backers of Israel are unlikely to review their policies out of a sense of guilt or remorse. In fact, the danger is that the opposite will occur. This is what the powerful Israel lobby in Washington suggests.

It argues that the Israeli approach has proven itself and that Israel did well to ignore whispered American advice regarding its conduct of the war in Gaza. In the case of the war on Lebanon, the US was convinced of the Israeli logic of jettisoning the rules of engagement in favour of full-scale war to remove Lebanon from the Iranian sphere of influence after eliminating it from the equations in Gaza. In other words, according to the Israeli lobby and its allies, Israel was right not to comply with Washington’s hesitation out of concern for the interests of other powers in the region because Arab regimes tend to respond to such colonial-style toughness, whether applied by the US in Iraq in 2003 or by Israel in Palestine and Lebanon. The Israel lobby and its right-wing allies in Washington claim to be more familiar and with the actual framework of the Arab countries than the liberals, many of whom are also supporters of Israel.

On the other hand, the Palestinian cause has gained new friends in the West, specifically at the grassroots level. However, this gain, as significant as it is, cannot be turned to effective political advantage without a Palestinian strategy for investing in it and a national democratic political discourse commensurate with the task.

For the next four years, the US will be governed by a far-right administration pandering to and exploiting the whims of a narcissistic president. At the heart of that process will be an irrational evangelical theological approach to Israel that is even more extreme than the Israeli far right. It is simultaneously in sync with the new oligarchy of business magnates who not only no longer ridicule the Trump model but have been seduced by it. Some of them clearly suffer from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

The belief that the US president is unpredictable yet easily manipulable by playing on his vanity is wishful thinking and a poor compensation for powerlessness. This president will blackmail the powerless in various ways, though this is not the place to go into details. Yes, he is capricious. He keeps the media occupied with his wild claims. He is obsessed with attention and recognition of his self-claimed leadership and abilities. But all that is defined by a specific framework, namely US interests as perceived by the far-right which brought him to power and as formulated in the populist discourse that appeals to his base. The US has entered a dangerous stage domestically and internationally.

Trump is not about to critically reappraise his previous term in office. He will do as before, only more fanatically. He will try to carry out ideas that time or the COVID pandemic had not permitted or that he blamed others for obstructing. He will try to prove that everything he did or could not do was right. For the Arab region and Palestine, this means a return to the so-called Abraham Accords as the solution to the conflict.

Trump made a point of letting Netanyahu know who’s the boss and who’s the underling in their relationship. This is because he wanted to score a personal success in brokering a truce to stop the war in Gaza. However, he will now try to bring more Arab countries aboard the Abraham Accords framework for normalization with Israel without a just solution to the Palestinian cause. He will recognize the illegal settlements and Israeli sovereignty over them. The only good that flattery from the Palestinian side will serve will be to personally immunize the flatterer, enabling him to play a part in the US game plan but with no influence on the rules and principles. This is how far Trump’s whims will go. To him, the reconstruction of Gaza should be seen through the lens of a beachside real estate development project which might require encouraging some population thinning. The implications are clear.

This said, the US president is not destiny or a natural phenomenon. He is not omnipotent. It is enough to recall how he floats outrageous balloons to gauge reactions. Weakness encourages him to demand more, morality and appeals to conscience have no place in his world. Power and wealth are his highest values. They spell success and their absence spells failure. He has no time for the weak and powerless.

Nevertheless, this approach will meet opposition in the US and elsewhere. This region has sources of strength that are too numerous to enumerate here. I will merely take this opportunity to stress that the failure to draw on these strengths to counteract US blackmail resides in the nature of the regimes and the conflicts between them. Resolving these conflicts will minimize the opportunities available to the US and Israel.

The Regional Position

The war on Gaza embarrassed the official Arab order. This was, firstly, due to the widespread solidarity with the Palestinian people across the Arab region, the frustration with official Arab positions, and the anger towards these regimes’ international allies – the US above all – for their unconditional support for the Israeli war. Secondly, it was because the war dragged on for so long without Israel succeeding in its stated aims of eliminating the Palestinian resistance or freeing the hostages militarily. It may be true that Arab public opinion is powerless and largely passive, glued to large and small screens, and consumed by social media with all the drivel that blurs the lines between a forum for discussion and a platform for vanity. But the extent of popular anger and resentment could not be ignored. This is why government-sponsored conferences were held, speeches were delivered, and some good decisions were made, albeit not for implementation.

Despite the embarrassment, Arab regimes had two motives to “resist” popular wrath: the Israeli persistence in pursuing the war to the end, including in Lebanon, and the US’s unwavering support for Israel. Torn between wanting to eliminate the Palestinian resistance movement, strip it of its regional allies, and end the periodic awkwardness they suffer from one war to the next, and their desire to lessen the brutality of the Israeli genocidal war to get the screams of women and children to stop, the Arab regimes have only the US to turn to for a solution to their dilemmas and their various embarrassments.

Yet, something may have emerged, stubbornly making its way through the chaos. In pressing forward, shrugging off American advice and leaving the Biden administration panting behind it, Israel demonstrated to the kind of politician who conflates pragmatism with amorality that it is a regional political player. This now may lead to a "pragmatic" shift from reliance on the US to reliance on Israel as an arbiter in regional conflicts, at least in part.

This development gained momentum through Israel's insistence on turning the war of attrition launched by Hezbollah in support of Gaza into an all-out war against the Lebanese resistance, which it has been preparing for since 2006. The divine victory rhetoric prevented Hezbollah from learning the lessons of that year's war and Israel’s reactions. The chain of events triggered by the 7 October operation brought the effective collapse of the axis of resistance and the fall of the corrupt and tyrannical regime in Syria, which was on the brink of collapse.

We can now expect Israel to boast to Arab regimes of how it freed them from the axis of resistance, reduced Hamas's ambitions to less than a return to the pre-7 October status quo, and left Iran scrambling to defend itself while Tel Aviv blatantly tries to prod Washington into a military strike against it to finish what Israel started. This is how Israel portrays such things.

Washington may not necessarily follow Israel’s bidding regarding Iran. However, even if we assume that Trump would prefer to deal diplomatically with a weakened Iran, it will not lead to a deal that revives Iran's role as a leader of a regional axis.

In anticipation of the Arab public’s reaction to the legitimization of Israel's regional role, the Palestinian cause remains the main factor in fending off such a development. To this end, it is important to take a fresh look at the resistance’s strategy, reevaluating it, without relinquishing resistance as a strategy against the occupation and apartheid. We must conceive new tools for the struggle and a new democratic political discourse commensurate with the changes that have taken place in Palestinian society, the outlooks of its new generations, and the views of international circles sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and the commitment to justice, which can only be obtained through liberation from occupation. Without this, I see no light at the end of the tunnel. We must light our way out.